The Young and The Feckless: The End

This is it, folks. We've reached the end of The Young and The Feckless line. Writing for Bitch has been a great experience for me. I've enjoyed shedding light and perspective on some of the unacknowledged and underrepresented aspects of the media coverage around young adult issues and responding to all of your challenging and thoughtful comments. Thanks for reading and engaging.

My initial instinct was to leave you with a list of Gen Y related resources (you already know about Mobilize and Campus Progress and The Pew, right?) but, as much as I love lists, I'm a reluctant curator and an even more reluctant endorser. What makes the cut? What doesn't? Why should you trust my taste over your own interests? There is also the fact that most discussion of young adults is either of the arms-length anthropological variety (just about every news article I've linked to in the last eight weeks) or is of the even more odious kindercorporatist variety in which ambitious twentysomethings tell other ambitious twentysomethings how to climb the career ladder and all but drown each other in a collective tongue bath of jargon-laced mutual adoration. Those resources are very easy to find if that's your scene, but I'll be damned if I'm going to link to them myself.
Photo by Peter Kaminski

As well, I think there's more value in analyzing broad-based socioeconomic and political issues through a youth lens and with an eye to interpreting their effects on young workers, students, marginalized youth populations, etc. and engaging directly with other non-youth discussants to advocate for sufficient attention for these effects (something that we could, collectively, be stronger at doing) vs. simply huddling in a corner dissecting "Millennial" issues and engaging in rhetorical pissing contests over whether generational stereotypes are accurate, relevant, etc. So, more politicization (we can start with baby steps in the area of punditry/analysis if need be), less navel gazing.

If you're interested in keeping up with my post-Bitch doings, you can find me at my own site, Generation Meh, where I'm just about to launch a new project - a guest essay series (essay being loosely defined to cover all sorts of media) about the youth interpretation of and reaction to the traditional American Dream. If you're interested in getting involved, I'd love to hear from you. And, of course, you can always catch me on Twitter.

Many thanks to Kelsey, Kjerstin and the Bitch team for all their hospitality.

Cheerio!

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